Lera Auerbach: Non cetera desunt (The ‘Rest’ of the Story is Not Missing)

E    ach of the piece’s eight short movements also carries a Latin title, taken from Ovid, Horace and others, but the relevance of those is neither obvious nor especially important. (According to her program notes, Auerbach is reluctant on principle to say anything concrete about the music or its subject matter, although she’s perfectly happy to spend many, many paragraphs telling listeners [stories] about her reticence.)”
  —  Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 21-MAR-2009.

A    ll theorizing is a form of world-creation and, as such, is ineluctably ‘fictive’. But this does not mean that all modes of imagining tend toward ‘creative possibility’... Fictive forms of thought that efface, negate, and forget their [possibilistic] power in favor of authoritative and, thus, ‘legislative’ and programmatic power.”
  —  Susan McManus, p. 19.

S  ometimes what you want most to hear is a story, well-told. If that is the chamber music craving you are having, you could not do better than to listen to, or play, a piece by Lera Auerbach. The imagery of pianist-poet-composer Lera Auerbach is varied, pluralistic—possessed of multiple ‘facets’ or points of view and simultaneously supportive of two or more of them at a time.


    [50-sec clip, Ksenia Nosikova, Lera Auerbach, Images No. 5, ‘Old Photograph from the Grandparent’s Childhood’, 1.6MB MP3]

B ut that doesn’t mean that Auerbach is a ‘relativist’: some facets or perspectives are more valued or legitimate or commendable than others, and Auerbach provides numerous reasons and musical ‘arguments’ setting forth her own feelings and evolving interpretations.

H er music affords the listener or performer considerable ‘latitude’. But she persuades her performers/audience to her point of view by creating a series of imaginative, fictional roles that she invites us to inhabit. Her composing in some ways resembles the storytelling of highly political authors … an Austen; a Dickens; or a Chekhov or a Dostoevsky, say.

I n that connection, political art is, I believe, most efficacious, not when it advances abstract principles, but when it instead alters listeners’ understanding of their own past and future. Is this a feature of Auerbach’s writing? I think so. The composer creates an account of History or of Time itself—ideally, the ‘center’ of (and not merely an ‘ornament’ of) an account of human nature and politics. We hear it—or play it—and recognize the broad, generalized validity and depth of what has been said. ‘Images from Childhood’, for example—or ‘24 Preludes’—are miniatures, but they are not ‘bon bons’.

S o Lera Auerbach’s politics permeate her compositions and performances, seeking not so much to reform our ethics as to reshape our memories. Lera’s work positions narrative in politics, or narrative as a way of doing politics. It insists on a broad connection between political identity and narrative. I do not know whether major figures in the history of political thought—Locke, Hegel, Marx—have a bearing on Lera’s methods or motivations. But Lera argues that each composition rewrites the past in an explicit attempt to direct the future. It is a ‘redemptive’ approach to the past, insofar as it places responsibility on human freedom and action in the present. How do I retrieve my childhood memories of the scary family photo albums, with the ancient sepia-tint monochrome images of early 20th-Century Evanstas and Østensos and Andersons and Thiedes?

S he confronts the epistemological dilemma of what things we can know and how we can know them. Auerbach closely regulates her musical ‘stories’—defining, expanding, reiterating, delineating them, bar-by-bar, phrase-by-phrase. She grants permission to us performers and listeners, but her cues are so numerous as to make the remit kind of superfluous. Her demonstrativeness and transparent intelligibility are something like ... Prokofiev’s?

A  nd what about ‘Cetera desunt’ [Latin: ‘the rest is missing’]? This title is maybe an ironic joke? This string quartet is not in any respect ‘incomplete’, nor is the sense it conveys tremendously open-ended.

T here are characters, plots, themes, etc.—and Lera’s ‘vocabulary of affect’ is positively ‘narratorly’ and fastidious throughout. The pacing in this, as in other of her compositions, is characteristically narrative. No, the ‘rest’ is not missing. It is all here—right in your mind; right where Lera put it.


W onderful music to immerse yourself in! Be sure to hear her ‘Cetera desunt’ performed by RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet on Wednesday 01-JUL at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Lera’s account of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, if you are able to attend.

• Lera Auerbach website
  
• Gluzman V, Auerbach L. Preludes and Dreams. (Bis, 2006.)
  
• Gluzman V, Yoffe A. Auerbach: 24 Preludes for Violin & Piano. (Bis, 2003.)
  
• Nosikova K. Auerbach L. Flight and Fire. (Profil-Haenssler, 2007.)
  
• Petersen Quartett. Auerbach: String Quartet No. 3 'Cetera desunt'. (Capriccio, 2006.)
  
• Auerbach L. Sorokolunie (40 Moons). Kniga, 1995.
  
• Auerbach L. Gannoverski Tetradi. Slovo, 2003.
  
• Anderson W, ed. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Bks. 1-5. Univ Oklahoma, 1998.
  
• Bal M. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Univ Toronto, 1997.
  
• Braidotti R. Nomadic Subjects. Columbia Univ, 1994.
  
• Braidotti R. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity, 2002.
  
• Chatman S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell Univ, 1980.
  
• Currie M. Postmodern Narrative Theory. Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.
  
• Derrida J. Acts of Literature. Routledge, 1991.
  
• Gibson A. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh Univ, 1997.
  
• Herman D, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge Univ, 2007.
  
• Herman L, Vervaeck B. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Univ Nebraska, 2005.
  
• Knight D. Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing. Oxford Univ, 1997.
  
• Massumi B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke Univ, 2002.
  
• McManus S. Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005.
  
• Palmer A. Fictional Minds. Univ Nebraska, 2008.
  
• Phelan J. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progression, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Ohio State Univ, 2007.
  
• Raia A, Luschnig C, Sebesta J. Worlds of Roman Women: A Latin Reader. Focus, 2005.
  
• Walsh R. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Ohio State, 2007.

Saucius ille tamen ‘fer opem. matertera dixit	Wounded, he cries out
‘Autonoe! moveant animos Actaeonis umbrae!’	‘Help, Aunt Autonoe! Save your kin, Actaeon!’
Illa, quis Actaeon, nescit dextramque precantis	But who is this Actaeon? How would she know?
abstulit, Inoo lacerata est altera raptu.	She tears off his right arm, and Ino, enraptured, savages the left.
Non habet infelix, quae matri bracchia tendat,	He has no arms to reach out to his mother, poor sod,
trunca sed ostendens deiectis vulnera membris	but shows her his torso with its missing limbs and cries out
‘Adspice, mater!’	‘Mom, look!’

—Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk 3

Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis...	Deucalion tearfully perceived the emptiness and desolation...
‘Si sine me tatis erepta fuisses, nunc animus, miseranda foret?’	‘How would you feel had Fate taken you away without me?’
‘Quo sola timorem ferre modo posses?’	‘How would you bear this terror all alone?’

—Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk 1